Sleeping Murder. Агата Кристи
id="uc0a1d97b-18be-5ba6-b0b0-cea3c8a5495b">
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by
Collins, The Crime Club 1976
Sleeping Murder™ is a trade mark of Agatha Christie Limited and Agatha Christie® Marple® and the Agatha Christie Signature are registered trade marks of Agatha Christie Limited in the UK and elsewhere. Copyright © 1976 Agatha Christie Limited. All rights reserved.
Cover by www.designedbydavid.co.uk © HarperCollins/Agatha Christie Ltd 2016
Agatha Christie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008196639
Ebook Edition © December 2016 ISBN: 9780007422814
Version: 2017-04-11
Contents
Gwenda Reed stood, shivering a little, on the quayside.
The docks and the custom sheds and all of England that she could see, were gently waving up and down.
And it was in that moment that she made her decision—the decision that was to lead to such very momentous events.
She wouldn’t go by the boat train to London as she had planned.
After all, why should she? No one was waiting for her, nobody expected her. She had only just got off that heaving creaking boat (it had been an exceptionally rough three days through the Bay and up to Plymouth) and the last thing she wanted was to get into a heaving swaying train. She would go to a hotel, a nice firm steady hotel standing on good solid ground. And she would get into a nice steady bed that didn’t creak and roll. And she would go to sleep, and the next morning—why, of course—what a splendid idea! She would hire a car and she would drive slowly and without hurrying herself all through the South of England looking about for a house—a nice house—the house that she and Giles had planned she should find. Yes, that was a splendid idea.
In that way she would see something of England—of the England that Giles had told her about and which she had never seen; although, like most New Zealanders,